I caught Chris Rock’s opening monologue for the 2016 Academy Awards, the #OscarsSoWhite as it had been known in the months leading up to it. People were interested to see how Rock would handle the cultural tension, given the outcry over the lack of minority representation among the nominees. Some in the film industry said Rock should turn down the gig; Will and Jada Smith, among other prominent black celebrities, boycotted the Oscars. Others said he should “speak truth to power.” Rock opted for the second option, delivering a scathing roast on liberal Hollywood’s “sorority racism,” as he called it. It was a funny monologue, eliciting big belly laughs in between nervous, collar-tugging giggles and guilty blushing. At the end, Rock was applauded enthusiastically for his bravery, although perhaps the audience was also applauding themselves for being such good sports.

I couldn’t help but be reminded, as is often the case with pop culture spectacle, of the ancient Roman practice of Saturnalia. You might know Saturnalia as the precursor to many rituals now associated with Christmas. It was a festival that took place at the Winter Solstice to commemorate Saturn, an ancient fertility god said to have presided over The Golden Age, a time of endless peace and prosperity. Saturn is a complex god who has roots predating Rome by millennia as well as aspects syncretized from other cults, like the Greeks and the Carthaginians. To the Romans, he was a god of agriculture and wealth, a god who promised renewal after dark times. He was also a god of destruction, of liberation, of inversion of the social order.

To that end, a key component of the Saturnalia festival was social role reversal. Masters would host feasts for their slaves, and later, during the Imperial period, one lucky nobody would be crowned Saturnalicius Princeps, King of the Saturnalia, or the Lord of Misrule. This Lord of Misrule would preside as a master of ceremonies and revelers would obey his commands to act silly, sing songs, strip naked, or jump into ponds & fountains. One wonders if these temporary role reversals, much like the violent displays at the coliseum, were ways for the ruling elite to maintain a pressure-relief valve on the social order. After all, if the System carves out a little space for have-nots to blow off steam and usurp their “betters” for a time, at least it’s still taking place within the System. At least it’s Approved Rebellion.

I 100% believe in Chris Rock’s sincerity & passion in regards to minority portrayals & opportunities in Hollywood. I truly believe that he was trying to use edgy humor to pierce the hearts of the mostly-white, mostly-male audience. I don’t for a second believe that his invitation to the Oscars wasn’t in fact his promotion to Saturnalicius Princeps for a night, however. It was the perfect marketing move to add a whiff of interest to an industry orgy and to provide a safe space for Hollywood liberals to self-flagellate for the cameras. Another social crisis averted; we did it, everyone! We threw a feast, crowned a servant as master of ceremonies, let him make fools of us. But don’t worry: Saturn, whom the Greeks called Cronus, is also a god of seasons, and Spring will be here soon to return the earth to the way it was.

Towards the end of Season 5 of Game of Thrones, a character who the audience has been taught to hate is forced to walk down the streets of King’s Landing nude at the behest of a religious cult. The rabble scream invective at her, throw food, spit on her, and smear animal feces on her. She is reduced to tears as she makes the long walk to the castle. The camera follows her, step by agonizing step, lingering, judging. The sequence seems to last forever, reveling in the debasement of this villainess. Having just binge-watched the entire series in about a month, her sins were even fresher for me than if I had been following the series from the beginning. Even so, I found myself growing weary of her treatment all too quickly. After all that had happened in the course of the show, after all the evil and nihilism had been allowed to run around unchecked, this walk of shame was frankly unsatisfying. It wasn’t enough. In fact, Game of Thrones’ capital artistic offense is having created a story in which redemption might just be impossible.Evaluating art is often a fool’s errand. So much of media consumption comes down to personal taste that trying to force art into a good-bad taxonomy just riles people up and wastes time. For example, I hated Avatar and I hated Tree of Life. One was a pop-culture blockbuster “for the masses” and one was an inscrutable “arthouse” film. I thought both were tedious and ineffective. However, one is the highest grossing film of all time and the other is a critical darling beloved by some of the smartest cinephiles in the world (I’ll let you guess which is which). For me to call either film “bad” is at best uninteresting. It’s far more interesting to talk about the composition of the film and what I found effective or ineffective. It’s far more interesting to debate the merits of film-making technique, story structure, and visual accomplishment. However, reducing art’s calling to be merely compositionally excellent is turning a blind eye to art’s unique ability to inspire us and make us more virtuous people, or at least more joyous.I don’t mean to imply that all “good” art needs to be facile or saccharine. Art has unique ability to bring people into worlds they’d never experience otherwise and not all of these worlds are happy ones. Most of us can’t imagine going through slavery or the Holocaust or the death of a spouse or fighting in the Iraq war or any of the other awful lived realities certain people have experienced. Art bestows on us the empathy that comes from tasting of the darkest fruits of the human experience. In order to do that, though, it has to present us with a call to action, a choice of light over darkness, an alternative to fight for. Art can show us the blackest pits of human depravity and still enrich us by giving just the faintest hint of a glimmer in the distance, by even giving us the rumor of something better. Les Miserables is not a happy book, but it taught me to be happier and to show much more grace & compassion to criminals when I was a police officer.Over the course of five seasons, Game of Thrones has gotten the blackest pits part down. Again and again, the kindest people on the show are tortured, raped, abused, and murdered while the worst humans alive prosper and gloat. Again, in and of itself, this is not a problem. Part of weaving a good tale is having night grow darkest before the dawn, creating tension by making the audience worry whether their heroes can save the day in the end. Films like The Empire Strikes Back nail this perfectly and it makes an audience crave resolution. Where Game of Thrones falls short is in reinforcing a deep sense of nihilism by going too far to paint the world as an irreversibly horrible place. Over and over, any character that shows kindness or mercy is nearly immediately repaid in atrocity. Over and over, any light brought into the world is snuffed out. Over and over, Game of Thrones shows you that you’re stupid for hoping.Here’s the thing: I already know the world is a nasty place sometimes. The real world I inhabit contains such delights are child starvation, sexual slavery, school shootings, marauding murderous rape cults marching in the Middle East, female genital mutilation, suicide bombings, racist murders, crushing poverty, and the Entourage movie. Game of Thrones is not shedding light on anything I wasn’t already aware of by merely arranging all these barbarities in one X-rated diorama. In fact, Game of Thrones is intentionally ignoring the other elements of the real world I inhabit: doctors without borders, advances in clean water technology, Muslim charities fundraising for black Christians, church food drives, low infant mortality, tender acts of mercy between Israelis and Palestinians in Jaffa, and so on. The reason that the list of awful things matters is because the list of awesome things proves there is something to strive towards. If I thought life was meaningless, if I thought nothing mattered and nothing could change, I would pay no mind to the Yazidis forced into sexual slavery by ISIS. That horror matters because it shouldn’t be happening and it’s possible to stop it from happening. That horror matters because it is a deviation from what is right. That horror matters because I believe it is a stain. If the whole world is a stain, then there is no horror, only someone else’s pointless story.Game of Thrones is very well-composed. The costumes are stunning, the world-building is some of the best I’ve seen, the sets are breathtaking, and the action is intense. There is comedy, there is romance, there is adventure, and there is intrigue. I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t want to see where the story goes next. I just have this sinking feeling that the creators of the show have painted themselves into a philosophical corner. I have this intuition that they mistake grit for truth. And, I have this nightmare that audiences are titillated by the nihilism and are happily diving into a bleak world where they can be ids without consequence. If Game of Thrones is supposed to be escapist fun, I have to question the character of anyone who finds that world a worthy escape from their dull work-a-day lives. After all, the show tells us that good men are the first to die, that rape is only bad if you get caught, that power is worth any amount of bloodshed, even your own children’s. Anyone who wants to take a vicarious vacation in that world has some demons.Game of Thrones is apparently going to be a seven season narrative. I suppose it’s possible that the final two seasons will make some attempt at redeeming the world it has built. Perhaps I’ll be writing in two year’s time about the masterful turn of events that will inspire a generation towards goodness for years to come. My gut tells me this will not be the case. My gut tells me that the show will end with a victory for the least-worst characters and some sort of afterthought discussion of how good triumphed in the end. My gut tells me that the creators of Game of Thrones are far too fascinated by their ability to depict depravity and far too disinterested in what that depravity is depraved compared to. And frankly, that’s just a bad use of art.

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America handed down a ruling that legalized gay marriage in every state, and maybe Guam, I’m not sure. Wherever you come down on this issue, it was a historic day for the Republic. I happened to think it was a great decision and I felt compelled to deviate from my usual Friday night routine (crawling into a bottle of bourbon while I watch someone play video games on Youtube) and get out into the gay community to celebrate their victory and show my support & my admiration. I chose Play, a large LGBTQ club in Louisville, KY, to be my venue for this outing. The woman I’m straight-married to was out of town, so I went by myself, armed only with my charm and my wedding ring.The festivities began with a drag revue featuring trans divas performing everything from Gloria Gaynor to Pitch Perfect 2’s “Flashlight”. The gals were fantastic and the crowd was into it. However, the moment I knew something special was happening was when the hostess came out to do a little crowd work. All she had to say was “We did it!” and the crowd erupted. People were crying happy tears and dancing little jigs anywhere there was room. Then, the hostess found two lesbian couples that had been married the day of the decision and the crowd went wild cheering for these newly minted matrimonists. For those of you who found this historic day troublesome, I want to impress upon you that these happy cheers were not the hoots and hollers of kids opening Christmas presents or concert-goers seeing their favorite band. This happiness was a scarred, weather-beaten happiness. It was a happiness that looked like it had crawled on hands and knees out of the desert. It was a happiness forged in a foxhole and nourished in prison twilight. The celebrants weren’t just happy; they were liberated.

What really struck me, though, was what happened after. It was revealed that a bachelorette party was present at the club. The hostess brought Brittany, the (straight and, it was later discovered, Christian) bride-to-be up on stage along with her two besties for the requisite ribbing and ribaldry. Brittany was African American and she was very full-figured. Both her bridesmaids were white and extremely curvy as well, all three voluptuous in a way that is… let’s just say not celebrated by magazines or Hollywood. The gals were forced to participate in a lip sync contest, a runway strut contest, and a twerking contest. They were bashful at first but, at the insistence of the crowd, they stepped up and gave it their all. And they crushed it.What I loved was that the very mixed-race and mixed-orientation crowd was going nuts for these non-traditional beauties. Gay men, lesbians, straight women, myself… all of us were clapping and yelling and throwing money on stage while these women carried themselves with absolute confidence in their gorgeousness. Our culture doesn’t typically allow women of this body type to be the center of attention, but that night, a rowdy crowd of hundreds absolutely worshiped them. Most importantly, it was sincere worship. The gay men running up clapping and shoving dollar bills into Brittany’s hands were beaming with unfakeable joy and compassion. The whole night, it became obvious that every stranger in the room seemed to be wishing every other stranger the best in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a building before that gave the impression of having no walls.To my friends and family that found the Supreme Court decision troubling, I’m sincere when I tell you that my heart does ache for anyone whose deeply held religious beliefs are being left behind by the country. I don’t share many of them, but I still have empathy for people who see the culture abandoning matters of passionate conscience to them. I know that it’s painful. However, sitting among the people at Play, I couldn’t help but feel that the bliss-with-abandon I witnessed is worth that pain. The discomfort of traditionalists is valid, but it will fade with time. The pride and the dignity bestowed upon the LGBTQ community is eternal and it is beautiful (and sadly, it is stillnot complete). I’m not sure if there’s a God, and if there is, I’m not sure what they want. All I know is that whatever spirit of love was animating the Play Theater on June 26, 2015 is the spirit I’m choosing to throw my lot in with.

One of the most fascinating aspects of media critique, for me, is the study of how human beings use their media to enact and reinforce fantasies. When I write that, your mind may immediately jump to pornography and sexual media. Pornography may be the most explicit way we fantasize through media, but many critics would argue that not only is pornography not the only way we do it, it’s not even the most seductive way we do it. There are male power fantasies such as Captain America or Iron Man which allow men to live vicariously through the sometimes rich, sometimes heroic, but always good looking protagonists. There are young teen power fantasies like Spy Kids or Three Ninjas (dating myself a little with these references) in which adolescents can fantasize about being smarter and more capable than adults. There are musical fantasies for women about vandalizing the car of a cheating ex-lover or shaking off haters. These are all much more seductive than pornography, but that’s an essay for a different time. Instead, let me show you an image below that is one of the most compelling fantasy images broadcast in recent memory.

(Image attribution: Jim Watson/Getty)Make no mistake, this is as alluring as any centerfold, and for a far greater audience. This image is a fantasy image for two very different groups of people. The first group is Sheltered White America, for lack of a less polemic term. For the Sheltered White American, this image stimulates an instinctive distrust of urban culture, the lower classes, and in some racist hovels in the country, a straight up distaste for non-whites. This image reinforces the juicy notion that poor black males are inherently dangerous, that they are a destructive presence, and that their poor station in life is, if not a result of, at least aided by bad behavior. It boosts the signal of a very specific version of Just World theory in which those that have it bad deserve it. However, this is also a fantasy image for Social Justice America. For this group, the image is a symbol of triumph over oppression, of the noble struggle against injustice. It is acknowledgement that poor black voices go unheard in media & politics such that the only way to break through is to break things. The young man in this image is the voice of his generation, a clenched fist and a booming “No!” to the structural injustice inherent to the American system. The image depicts a freedom fighter and a lighthouse to all who have been wronged by the American machine. It is a call to hear the lived experience of the underclass and a call to reform, rework, and if necessary, revolt. In lectures and in his book Enjoy Your Symptom, Slavoj Zizek tells the story of a man who loses his beloved wife to disease at an early age. The man is able to speak of this loss with composure to such a degree that his friends start to wonder if he really loved her at all. It is then they realize that every time he speaks calmly about his wife, he is stroking her treasured pet hamster. The man seems to cope with his wife’s death smoothly for weeks until the hamster finally dies, sending the man into depression, psychosis, and eventually resulting in his hospitalization. Zizek makes the case that the hamster is a fetish, an object that allows the man to (pretend to) accept his catastrophic reality. The fetish detraumatizes the traumatic for us, that’s why it is so often associated with sex.I argue that the above image is likewise a fetish, for both sides of the cultural divide. Sheltered White America rightly finds the crime and decay associated with low-income neighborhoods stressful. They see communities brimming with professional thieves, drug dealers, and kids itching to shoot it out with each other to prove their manhood. Where these communities butt against White America’s stomping grounds, there is, for them, a legitimate concern for their safety and peace as they see drug-addicted homeless people wandering the streets and occasionally resorting to theft (or worse). If you've ever sat with someone whose home was burglarized during the holidays and had all the presents under their tree stolen, as I have many times, you know the gut-wrenching agony they feel from the violation and the realization that this is going to taint many holidays to come with fear. Coupling things like this with the thought of gang violence erupting and senselessly cutting down young teens and the whole thing is very traumatic; how couldn't it be? Spoiler alert: it is for the people who live there, too! Those people additionally find it traumatic to be part of communities that are often ignored and forgotten by people in power. Sure, some get food stamps or unemployment checks, but this is a weak salve applied to the injuries suffered: countless arrests for petty marijuana possession making it difficult to stay employed, schools stuffed to the rafters with neglected kids presided over by rookie teachers, companies hesitant to invest jobs in the area, parks that aren't safe to go to, police officers that may not be safe to go to, and a sneering contempt from people of privilege, as if they’d have done any better under the same circumstances. How are we to cope with this bleak reality? With a fetish. Sheltered White America can clutch the above image to their breast and be reassured that these benighted communities are getting what they deserve, what with all these “thugs” roaming the streets, vandalizing cars and sabotaging firefighting equipment. Social Justice America can hold up the image and find comfort in the fact that “bad” behavior is simply a natural outgrowth of neglect & inequality and that looting or rioting is really a political act by those who can’t afford to hire expensive lobbyists. Whatever small kernels of truth may exist in either of these views is largely irrelevant because, despite photojournalism’s ostensible attempt at capturing reality “as it really is”, photos like these are being used, by and large, to stimulate fantasies, like a young teen leering at the bra section of a Sears catalog. You can read other articles for theories about what the root cause of the Baltimore Riots/Uprising is. Systemic racism, left wing coddling, income inequality, the collapse of the nuclear family, uneven playing fields, poor education, police brutality, dead-end job market… who knows? I suspect it’s a Both/And situation as opposed to Either/Or. I certainly don’t think it’s something that Sheltered White America is going to solve by name-calling (seriously, just let “thug” go, y’all) or that Social Justice America is going to solve by tacitly condoning burning down senior centers (seriously, arson is bad politics, y’all). What might help is for everyone to understand the very real trauma experienced by both sides and to go easy on discounting that trauma. What might help is to stop reducing either side to a set of talking points. What might help is recognizing that the trauma of everyday reality is something that we're all going through and for which we're all equally reliant on fetishes to get us through. I’m reminded of 9/11, a trauma that affected every corner of this country, and every square inch of New York City. The stories that came in the wake of that atrocity were inspiring: people from all walks of life and all positions of privilege & poverty were able to come together because of a strong sense that they were all in this together. Well, as you consume media coming out of Baltimore, remember: we’re all in this together. Holding police and politicians accountable anywhere is good for us everywhere. Job creation and building opportunities anywhere is good for us everywhere. Good education anywhere is good for us everywhere. Kindness, compassion, and human dignity anywhere is good for us everywhere. And, public safety and a just rule of law anywhere is good for us everywhere. None of that is a left/right issue, though the blueprint for how to get there is. We can keep trying the apathy/name-calling/rioting solution (it sure is working wonders around the country!) or we can start to find places where our blueprints overlap and work on those for awhile. Maybe after some soul-searching and hard work, we can get back to enjoying some more upbeat fetishes again.

In the months leading up to my resignation from the police force and my move across country to Minnesota, I often said I was eager to get to my new home and put down roots. I’d lived in Southern California for the previous 17 years and had a vast network of family, friends, ex-girlfriends, favorite restaurants, favorite hiking trails, and favorite life rhythms. I was basically giving up my entire life as I knew it, but I expected that over time, I would form new networks, find new places, and start a new family.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, moving to a brand new state by yourself is absolutely surreal. You don’t know where anything is, you don’t know how to get to places you want to go, and you don’t know what else you don’t know. Minnesota was even more challenging because social circles form very early and rarely change. People in their 30s go out for drinks with people they went to middle school with. In California, everyone in a town is from somewhere else, but in Minnesota, everyone is from the same five mile area they grew up in. If you’re not Hmong or Somali, there isn’t a constant flow of people migrating into the state you can commiserate with. You have to put a lot of effort into etching grooves into the cold northern soil.

Within a few months of moving to Minnesota, I met the woman who would become my bride. Oddly enough, she was also a transplant, but by way of Washington State. There was instant chemistry between us, aided in no small part by our outsider status, a status she still kind of had after ten years in the state. Our relationship blossomed quickly and before long we were engaged. Around the same time, I realized my job was slowly killing me with stress and sought employ elsewhere. 15 months after setting up shop in Minnesota, I packed up my car and my wife and drove 12 hours to Louisville, Kentucky.

I’ve been in Kentucky for three months now and have had to start the process of carving out a space in a new state all over again. Fortunately, I have an uncle in the state and my parents & sister will be joining my wife & I by the end of the year. But, in the meantime, it’s been weighing on me that for almost two years now, I’ve been living without roots. I’ve been a tumbleweed, blown along by the wind. I appreciate now why most people tend not to move more than 20 miles from where they grew up. I understand the appeal.

What I’m learning is that I was naive to think I could put down roots in a new state. My stupidity is contained right there in the metaphor; plants don’t “put down” roots, their roots grow with them over a long time. Roots work through the soil to find the nutrients and hydration the plant needs, slowly discerning their way with trial and error. Even though I’m here with the love of my life, and even though I have a new job that I’m crazy about, and even though I’ve discovered that Louisville is not the hillbilly Juggalo mecca I’d feared, there is no rushing root growth. It’s going to be a long time until I’m “from here”. It’s going to take a long time to make this place my home. It reminds me of my days patrolling a predominantly Hispanic immigrant area of Los Angeles county. I remember thinking it so strange that the citizens rarely moved away from the area, even though it was crime-ridden and dirty. I would meet people who’d moved from one street to the next street over to an apartment three blocks away, always within the neighborhood though. I now realize why immigrant families would fiercely protect those nascent root systems.

I can’t say I regret moving away from California. It was too crowded, too expensive, and too noisy. Plus, these days it’s turned into a Mad Max-style desert wasteland. Not to mention the fact that I, y’know, found the most incredible woman on the planet when I moved away. Even so, I never fully respected what I’d given up until it was gone, and I never fully respected the allure of being rooted into a place, the comforting embrace of being from where you are. I don’t know if Kentucky is going to be the state I’m buried in, but I do know that a man could probably get used to living almost anywhere once his roots get deep enough. Except for Detroit.

This video game discussion begins, as you would expect, with a passage I was reading from Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry. He discusses a short story by Patricia Highsmith called “Black House”. In it, several men in a small town saloon are drinking and reminiscing about an old dilapidated mansion on the edge of the village. They wax nostalgic about sneaking around the place in their youth despite rumors of ghosts and psychopaths murdering innocents therein. Many of the men smoked their first cigarette in the Black House and many of them conducted their first sexual experiments there. Now, there is a tacit prohibition towards going there; it’s off-limits, it’s not safe.A traveler passing through the town overhears this discussion and declares that he will go to the Black House to see for himself. He breaks into the house and nervously explores, not sure what to expect. He soon discovers that the house contains no ghosts, no psychopaths, just some dusty garbage and nothing else. He returns to the saloon and tells the men that their Black House is just an old uninteresting ruin. An argument breaks out, one of the men strikes the traveler, knocking him down and eventually killing him.Zizek maintains that the men lash out at the traveler because, for them, the Black House was a fantasy space separated from reality, a canvas upon which the men could project their dreams and desires without reality intruding. The travelers crime was in breaching the sanctity of the fantasy space and dragging it back down to the level of mundane reality. As Zizek says, the traveler “deprived the men of the space in which they could articulate their desires.”This immediately brought to mind the war happening on the geekier outskirts of social media. On one side fights the “SJW”, or, Social Justice Warrior. SJWs are concerned with the lack of woman and minority representation in video games (to say nothing of even polite treatment of trans people), as well as tropes and themes common to video games that are seen as socially problematic in the modern world. They are tired of seeing minorities reduced to stereotypes and women reduced to trophies or victims whose sole purpose is to motivate the white male protagonists. On the other side fights the Hardcore Gamer. For them, gaming is an escapist medium that allows them to engage in harmless power fantasies. They play video games as a respite from a cold & cruel world and resent SJWs trying to insert political issues into things that are supposed to just be for fun. They argue that the video game audience is predominantly white male, thus video game heroes are as well. Many argue that playing as a woman or a person of color would ruin their immersion in these fantasies and since games are “for them”, there is little reason to force the issue. They argue that if there’s a market for games about black lesbians, games will be created to serve that market. Since those games don’t really exist, the market must not exist either.The battle is being waged in many different places online, from Facebook and Twitter to gaming magazines, online discussion boards, and developer websites. At times, it turns nasty, even dangerous. There have been several cases of hardcore gamer groups releasing the personal information of high profile figures in the SJW community, threatening to rape and kill female bloggers, even reports of real life harassment and stalking. Some women have left online communities or even moved homes because the harassment reached such a terrifying level. The gamer groups are quick to point out that only a few fringe elements are conducting these terror campaigns and that, besides, people say a lot of things from the comfort of anonymity they don’t really mean. The gamer groups often deny that the women are in any real danger, that it’s just kids on the internet blowing off steam. To my knowledge, the social justice movement has never threatened to rape or murder any members of the hardcore gaming community. The worst they can be accused of is contributing to bad reviews of certain games and the occasional calls for boycott. Why then the disproportionate response for the hardcore gamers?I think it has a lot to do with the notion of video games as a modern analogue to the Black House. In this case, it’s not men in a small town tavern articulating their nostalgic fantasies, it’s men in the global village articulating power fantasies. Gaming has been historically tied to socially marginalized groups (nerds, geeks, loners) who’ve lacked standing in schools and businesses. Gaming provides worlds in which they wield unimaginable power, enjoy the respect of peers and the opposite sex, and generally have much more agency than in the halls of their schools or their homes. Video games provide a canvas upon which these people can fantasize freely. By breaking into the video game world and exposing its emptiness and its garbage, SJWs have “deprived the men of a space in which to articulate their desires.”If this psychoanalytic analysis is correct about the cause of the outrage on the part of the hardcore gaming community, it may also provide insights on why this battle is all the more worthy of being fought. If video games (like film) shape consumers by not just giving them what they want but instead teaching them how to want, outmoded traditional video game tropes may be training a generation of people to want some unhelpful things in unhelpful ways. I’m not talking about ill-conceived attempts to link video game violence with school shootings and the like. Instead, I think it’s problematic enough to subtly reinforce notions that straight white men are the “default heroes” in the world and that we should want this to be upheld. It’s problematic enough that, in traditional video game narratives, women function without agency, sexual violence against women is a plot device to motivate a man, transgenderism is code for “creepy villain”, and the black male body is built purely for strength & violence in the video game world (while the black female body hardly even exists).Ironically, it is precisely this harsh spotlight of criticism that serves as a beacon hope for the industry. Indeed, I’m glad video games are falling under the same scrutiny as other elements of pop culture because I want them to succeed as worthwhile art. I am someone who loves video games and who has been rewarded by them again and again. Video games taught me a love of music from an early age as well as gave me a thirst to be creative, to tell stories and build worlds out of words, images, and sounds. I don’t want to watch the industry stagnate and fade away, I want to see it tempered in the heat of criticism and made stronger. Straight white men will never want for suitable power fantasies; some of us merely want to open that playing field to people of color, to women, to gay & trans folk, and we want to do so in order to make all power fantasies a little healthier. If we can escape into dream worlds that don’t mindlessly harm or erase less-privileged members of the community, we can enjoy these vacations guilt-free and, more importantly, we can enjoy them together.Video games are never going to be perfected and are never going to be without their sharp edges. The same is true of cinema, novels, oil paintings, and sea shanties. May it always be so! There is a place in the world for extreme art, for exploitation films, for death metal, for violent video games. For me, criticism isn’t about trying to smooth over every bump and corner until all art is a bland inoffensive gruel (which is a misconception animating otherwise good-hearted hardcore gamers). For me, criticism is simply a way to humble myself as a consumer, a way to interrogate my desires, and, when possible, a way for me to see new ways of loving my neighbor better through art or discussions thereof. I hope video games always push the envelope and challenge their consumers; I just hope they are as willing to challenge privileged “default” worldviews as much as they challenge hand-eye coordination.

I am very sad for my country these days. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen several young black men killed by white cops and a “white hispanic” neighborhood watch buffoon. We’ve watched those cops and that buffoon walk free, some not convicted by juries, some not even charged with crimes. Now, thousands of very angry people are demonstrating, protesting, and occasionally rioting in response. There is a very real and growing suspicion (if not hatred) of the entire edifice of policework in a growing number of sectors, from impoverished minority enclaves to affluent libertarian-leaning suburbs. On the darker outskirts of social media, the idea of armed insurrection is rising above a whisper. The powderkeg is full to the brim, awaiting a match. I am sad for the thousands of minority mothers & fathers who fear for the safety of their children. I’m sad for those children who no longer feel safe when they see a black and white patrol car turn down their street. I’m sad for the teens and twentysomethings in those communities who feel increasingly drafted into a cultural war, who are losing hope that it’s enough to just stay in school & work hard. I’m sad for the thousands of minority families who feel like giving up on the American dream and for the thousands of black men who genuinely believe their body is repugnant to White America. I’m equally sad for my first responder family, for the tens of thousands of cops out there who do the right thing, who treat people with respect, and who now have brighter-than-ever targets painted on them thanks to a media frenzy that obsesses over police abuses but clams up when various abuses are disproven or when police do their jobs well. I’m sad especially for the cops working in high crime areas, putting in long, thankless hours to protect communities that often don’t appreciate them and at times actively protect the very criminals they’re victimized by. I’m sad for all of us who have seen the realities of evil, who have seen the ways predators can terrorize victims not just for a night but in their dreams for the rest of their life. I'm sad for those of us who have watched those victims protect their tormentors in part because it’s Them against Us. I’m sad for the widows & orphans who have a folded flag on their mantle and a drunk nineteen year old on their television screen yelling “Fuck the pigs” from the comfort of police aegis. I’m sad because it is both true that blacks are more likely to face severe (even deadly) consequences than whites for engaging in risky behavior and yet equally true that these behaviors remain risky (even unlawful) and that there is no martyrdom to be found in the famous cases of 2014. It wasn’t so long ago that the deaths of Emmett Till (savagely beaten to death for allegedly flirting with a white woman) and Medgar Evers (shot in the back by a cowardly hillbilly for his civil rights leadership) were clarion calls for reform rather than the deaths of a strong-arm robbery suspect and a man resisting what may have been his 31st arrest. And yet, thousands of my American brothers and sisters needed to see an indictment to feel like they were an important part of my country, to feel like black lives matter. I’m sad that an outcome satisfactory to Americans of all colors & classes was statistically unlikely in New York and frankly impossible in Ferguson. I’m sad that the death of Tamir Rice was both a tragedy that shouldn’t have happened and yet still probably a justified use of force in the eyes of the law, and that there is no way to make that cognitive dissonance feel okay for most people. I’m sad because those rallying around the police are half-right and those protesting the treatment of blacks in America are half-right, and because it feels like half-right is about as useless as a half-bridge. We’ve all picked teams now. Ferguson is a brand. I’m sad that now it’s a battle for the narrative, not a battle for the truth. I’m sad because I want to help and I don’t know where to start. I’ve become almost too cynical to believe any help is possible; a middle ground seems farther away than ever. I’m sad because, if we are just two cultural teams pitted against each other, I know at the end of the day I’ll probably protect an imperfect power hierarchy over bloody anarchy if it comes to that.Finally, I’m sad because I know my sadness is a pale, offensive distraction compared to three black families burying their dead as they limp towards an icy, bone-white Christmas.